Since the August 18 meeting, a letter has been sent by Chad Meadows to Benson Kirkman naming additional streets to be added to the traffic calming requests. Captain Poteat will be here on September 15; Eric Lamb comes on October 3. We are not sure if Nina Szlosberg can be here.
Any questions for Captain Poteat to answer can be sent to Peter Evans.
Mark Senior with the City of Raleigh Stormwater Management spoke to the Committee about stormwater run off, Simmons Branch and Bushy Branch.
The rehabilitation of White Oak Lake has been approved, funding is there and a consultant is working on design. Work should move forward in the next year. White Oak Lake is ranked pretty high on the priority list because the rehabilitation will create numerous positive affects. We can expect to also see culvert upgrades at Ravenwood, Kaplan, Pineview, Lial Court and Avent Ferry Road, as well as some stream stabilization and channel improvements at various locations.
The City Council has approved the Stormwater Utility. The money will be specific for stormwater for maintenance, repair and upgrade. The fee will be seen on March bills. Educating the public about this will start soon.
Bushy Branch: A proposal is waiting for Council and approval of property owners. It, too, is pretty close to starting up.
In order to compete for stormwater funds for projects we need to have someone to voice concerns to the Council regularly. We should prioritize our concerns, taking into account cost benefit and also dollars in cost from damage.
There is no City wide stormwater plan. Studies in the past have been done one by one with/by consultants. Some Utility dollars will go to staff and to looking at problems and developing a plan.
Francine Durso was the lead for Avent West group for Simmons Branch and stakeholders. She arrived as Mark Senior was finishing his talk and felt Mark had covered much of what she would have; she offered to come at any time to discuss Simmons Branch and to update us. To track projects and the priority list we could contact Danny Bowden.
We will try to get copies of the Simmons Branch and Bushy Branch Reports. As a first step we will try to get digital copies of the Executive Summaries and if possible, some of the maps onto the web site.
A Sub-committee assignment matrix was handed out. The list was revised a bit to move people closer to their first choices and to add additional people who turned in preferences. The Other Issues area was done away with and those issues were folded into the other five sub-committees.
The Neighborhood Preservation Task Force has had some very good dialogue with Lawyer Dan and it was asked did we want to hear from him or the City Attorney. It was decided to not hear from either lawyer now. When we had proposed solutions to issues, if we wanted legal dialogue we would discuss pursuing this possibility.
There was discussion about the Neighborhood Association, its future direction, inclusiveness of non-members, etc. It is apparent that there will be things people want out of the plan that the city won't or can't do and we need to look ahead to see what we can have in place to deal with issues in the future. The Neighborhood Association may not want to take on all of these things, but we will need a group to take them on.
It was decided that each Sub-committee will have a spokesperson. Sub-committees will come back to the group as a whole and let the group know the issues, take feedback, take the feedback and work in Sub-committee to suggest implementation of recommendations.
We will try the periodic update method for a short time to see if we can all operate effectively. Chad will prepare a meeting schedule. He will send us information so we can contact one another.
An angry neighbor from Octavia Street was at the Citizens Advisory Council on August 26, 2003, wondering how we could do this plan and tell property holders what they could and could not do with their property. He was planning on going before the City Council about this issue. James Brantley suggested we convey to Benson Kirkman a boundary outline. He also said we could get on the agenda to appear before the City Council and make a status report of the group and address this issue at that time. Chad will e-mail James Brantley for information on how to get onto the agenda.
Chad Meadows will e-mail Mark Senior to get copies of the Executive Summaries. Chad and Justus Peters will talk content of web page. Chad will contact Francine Durso as well as send out a list of Sub-committee contact information.
The dates for meeting for the rest of the year were listed: September 15, October 2, October 20, November 6, November 17, December 4, December 15.